Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is limited to 32-bit addresses. As more and more users connect to the Internet, often with multiple devices, address space exhaustion has become a serious problem. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) has been developed as a standardized solution, using a 128-bit address size. Unfortunately, complete migration to IPv6 is expected to take several years. As one interim solution, Network Address Translation (NAT) is being deployed on a large scale as a way to overcome the address space limitations, moving from the customer premise to the Internet service provider network as a carrier level service. Carrier level services require higher levels of reliability and redundancy than customer premise equipment.
Current approaches of provisioning, and synchronizing static port forwarding entries and other objects on an active redundant system include manual provisioning of the objects without any automated way of keeping this information in sync and are prone to error due to the number of manual steps involved. This is especially problematic in managed networks having redundant heterogeneous network elements that do not have a way of synchronizing this information.
Therefore, a means of providing an improved method of synchronizing NAT static port forwarding objects in redundant configurations is highly desirable.